a friend of mine wants to install the new version of the game on his windows 8 machine, but he got trouble playing or even starting the game. He basicly has a lag all the time...his ping is over 500 on each server and: he has the very best internet= 32.000 kb.

On the hardware side, maybe your buddy should check for the latest GPU and network chip driver. It's also never too bad to have them up to date.

On the Internet side: be sure he doens't use the network for some other tasks (updates, downloads, ...). I've also heard about some recurrent issues with some Internet-cable users; it's often because another users is using all the bandwidth on the wire you share with him. Sadly, there are no other way than to change to a phone line connection which means a new ISP in most cases.

I also remember when my wifi had some perturbations with some other wireless system (cold war like). I had to change channel to get it right. But it was with all kind of communication (ICMP, HTTP, etc.). It was fun to see all those packet drops and retransmissions

Lastly, check if he has this problem only with SG or any other network game (which then uses UDP). If the problem is there, check the option of your modem or router to be more friendly with UDP traffic. If nothing works (and you're sure it's network related) maybe getting a phone call with your ISP might solve the issue.

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